Out in the North Sea, wallowing sullenly in the trough of the waves, her masts gone by the board and her deck awash, lay the derelict schooner "Valkyrie" of Bergen. She would have been at the bottom of the sea had it not been for her cargo of Norway pine, keeping her painfully afloat against her will. Fate, with its little finger, moved this uncharted peril right in the track of the "Starlight," beating close-reefed through the buffeting waves on the night of May 1st, while Larssen, in his London home, satisfied that his plans had foreseen every human eventuality, slept the easy sleep of the successful.
CHAPTER x.x.xV
INTERVENTION
The "Starlight" struck the sodden derelict shortly before midnight, with a crash that jarred the yacht to her innermost fibres.
She struck it full abeam, like a motor-car smashing in the dark into an unlighted farm-waggon drawn across a country lane. Bows crumpled up; bowsprit snapped away; foremast, loosed from its stay, and forced back by the pressure of a half-gale on the close-hauled foresail, carried over to port in a tangle of rope and wire and canvas.
Thrown back on her haunches, the "Starlight" gasped and shivered and began to settle by the head from the rush of water into the forecastle.
"All on deck with lifebelts!"
A seaman rushed through the saloons, throwing wide the cabin doors, and shouting the captain"s order.
Up above, men were ripping the canvas covers off the life-boats, flinging oilskins and rugs and provisions into them, slewing round the davits, hauling on the fall-ropes--a furious medley of energies.
Matheson rushed to his wife"s cabin, helped her on with some clothes, tied her lifebelt, wrapped a rug around her, and hurried her on deck.
"What have we hit?" he snapped at the captain.
"Derelict."
"How long d"you give her?"
"Ten minutes at the outside!" flung back the captain, and then into his megaphone: "Lower away there with No. 4!"
Lifeboat No. 4 was the second boat on the port side--the leeward side.
No. 3 was buried under the tangle of wreckage from the collapse of the foremast, and therefore useless. The boat was already in the water, with the mate and four seamen aboard, when Matheson, who had hurried below, came again on deck with Olaf in his arms. Behind him panted the stewardess and Olive"s maid, terrified and clutching some worthless finery of hers.
"Women and children to No. 4!" shouted the captain.
"I won"t go without you!" cried Olive to her husband, clinging tight to him.
The captain wasted no precious moments on argument. He thrust the stewardess and the trembling maid before him, and stout arms bundled them down to the plunging boat. Then he pa.s.sed down the little boy.
"Is there room for all of us?" cried Olive.
"No!"
The mate cast off, and lifeboat No. 4 disappeared into the black night.
"Haul on the main and mizzen sheets!" ordered the captain, to bring the yacht round and get a leeward launch for Nos. 1 and 2.
Presently the two crackling sails gybed over with a thud, and the "Starlight" lay on the starboard tack, head down and filling rapidly.
"Hurry like h.e.l.l!" shouted the captain.
Into No. 1, with the boatswain in charge and four seamen, went Olive and her husband and the cook; and into No. 2 crowded the carpenter, the two stewards, and the rest of the crew. For the captain was left the frail dinghy, slung from the stern. True to the tradition of the sea, he had refused a place in any of the lifeboats.
Lifeboat No. 2 got away first of the two. It was being tossed dizzily amongst the inky combers twenty yards distant, the men rowing feverishly to get clear of the yacht before she sank and sucked them under. But with No. 1 there was some hitch. The boatswain had unshackled the fall-ropes aft, and the boat slewed off with the jerk of a heavy wave.
"Clear away there forward, blast you!"
Two seamen were tugging at the fall-block. Something had fouled. The "Starlight" was rearing head stern up; her shattered bows were already under the waves; her life was now a matter of seconds only.
"Cut the ropes, you blasted idiots!"
Before the two men could get their knives through the tough rope, the "Starlight" reared like a bucking mare and plunged to her grave, dragging with her lifeboat No. 1 and its eight occupants.
"Jump for it!" yelled the boatswain.
Matheson, one foot caught under a seat, was dragged down and down until his heart hammered like a piston and his lungs were bursting with the fierce effort to hold his breath.
To the drowning man there comes a moment when he perforce gives up the fight and abandons himself to the blessed peace of unconsciousness, like a wanderer in a snowstorm lying down to rest. That moment had come to Matheson, when suddenly the half-severed rope that shackled the lifeboat to the doomed yacht gave way, and with a mutinous jerk the boat rushed itself to the surface, bottom upwards, flinging Matheson clear.
His craving lungs opened to the free air; he lay back on his cork-jacket gulping it in greedily as the whirlpool formed by the sinking yacht carried him round and round in dizzy circles.
The moments of recuperation past, his first thought was for his wife. He caught sight of a shapeless something at the further side of the whirlpool, and with all his strength beat round towards it. It was Olive, clinging to an oar.
He reached her; shouted some words of hope above the roar of the wind; searched around the blackness of the night for a place of safety. Thirty yards away, tossed upwards on a giant wave as though in signal to them, there showed for a brief moment the silhouette of an upturned boat, with two men clinging to it.
"Our boat--over there!" he cried to Olive, and clutching her by the arm, fought the combers towards the hope of refuge.
Straddled across the upturned lifeboat were the boatswain and a seaman.
The others had disappeared. On such a night it was impossible to rescue them unless by the accident of chance.
Matheson, buffeted and blinded by the thrash of the waves, just managed to drag Olive to the boat"s side. The boatswain, Fraser by name, lent him a hand while he recuperated sufficiently to hoist Olive across the keel of the storm-tossed boat.
"Where are the other boats?" he asked of Fraser, when he had recovered speech.
The boatswain made a gesture of helplessness. In that inky night, who could say where lifeboats No. 2 and 4 might be?
Presently a rocket flung a rain of white stars across the black curtain of the sky. It must be from one of their own boats. But it was far away across the waters. They shouted with all their might. The wind hurled their words away in disdain of the puny effort.
Matheson had pocketed a flask of brandy when the call of all hands on deck had sent him tumbling out of his berth. He now poured some of the spirit down Olive"s throat, and pa.s.sed the flask on to the men.
"Be sparing with it," he warned.
Then he set to work to make his moaning wife as comfortable as the terrible circ.u.mstances of their plight would permit. He took off his coat and got her into it, binding her cork jacket around. A rope was trailing from the stern and he secured this and tied it round her waist, giving one end to Fraser to hold and keeping tight hold of the other himself.
Very little was said as the endless hours of the night dragged their leaden length to a sullen dawn.
"Give me the morphia!" Olive had moaned at intervals, in a delirium of fever.